Werner Herzog would make a great subject for a Werner Herzog documentary; the director is an adventurer of outsize ambitions and eccentric appetites. For four decades, he has examined and embodied one grand theme: a charismatic man is seized by some magnificent idea, and his pursuit often drives himself toward madness and those around him near despair. The protagonists of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are two such obsessives. In this decade Herzog found two other suitable subjects, who inspired two extraordinary films. One is Grizzly Man‘s Timothy Treadwell, who lived among wild bears in southern Alaska, recording their strange behavior, and his. The other is The White Diamond‘s Graham Dorrington, a London University aeronautical engineer who has built an airship he wants to pilot over the rainforest canopy in Guyana. “We can realize our dreams!” he exclaims. “Let’s go fly!” When Dorrington finally gets up in the air, the feeling is not only contagious, it is sacramental. Like James Cameron’s Avatar, Herzog’s hallucinatory docs prove that the most thrilling adventures are those that illuminate the beauty and the peril in man’s quest both to tame nature and become one with it.
Careful readers will note the absence here of American independent films of the Sundance stripe — those sensitive dramas in which an outsider connects with home truths. I find most of them a little too aware of their worthiness, as well as structurally and cinematically timid. (No, not you two, Synecdoche, New York and The Squid and the Whale; you were swell.) I want my naturalism with a bang, and I got it with this scary, thrilling war movie about a U.S. Army bomb-defusing squad in Iraq, c. 2005. Mark Boal’s taut script focuses on one GI (Jeremy Renner, superb) who tersely insists on doing his own thing, which is to keep little pieces of Baghdad from blowing up. First shown in Sept. 2008 at the Venice Film Festival, The Hurt Locker took a while to make its impact in the U.S., but the movie and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, have dominated the year-end critics’ awards. If the shower of prizes ends with her becoming the first woman to win an Oscar as best director (over her ex-husband, James Cameron), that’d be OK too.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
